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Founded by a flutist and a percussionist, the Strasbourg-based ensemble HANATSUmiroir specialises in experimental music and stage research. But its musicians also work with young children, in nurseries and kindergartens. These workshops have a very appropriate name: HANATSUmini! Ayako Okubo, flutist of the ensemble, tells us about these meetings with an audience like no other.
How did HANATSUmini come about?
When you talk about contemporary music, people immediately think of unusual sounds: strange noises that surprise, that strike the ear. We wanted to introduce very young ears to the interest of the sounds around us. As soon as a noise is reproduced with intention, it becomes sound and therefore, potentially, music. For the past five years, we have been working with toddlers, from a few months to three years old, as well as with kindergarten students and older children in primary school. It is essential that very young ears - babies, toddlers - are introduced to a variety of musical languages, that they are open to all kinds of sounds, so that they do not consider experimental music as unpleasant sound, something to be regarded with suspicion! We want to enable these children to create an acoustic and sound background. Curiosity can be learned.
How do the workshops work?
Our interventions are necessarily short: half an hour for the very young, no more, one hour for primary school children. We don't play the ensemble's experimental repertoire for the little ones: it's not a question of offering a version of our concerts to children! We come with a suitcase full of natural objects: nuts, pebbles, grains of rice, to provoke sensory stimuli. Then we bring out the real instruments: bird whistles, then my flute. I demonstrate different blows, different sounds, an elaborate little melody, atonal... Sometimes I play little children's melodies, but not in the usual, expected way. I can also just press the keys of my flute, to make people guess a known melody, but with different timbres. Because we work primarily on the search for timbres during our sound-making workshops. There are three of us musicians from HANATSUmiroir who take care of HANATSUmini: Rajani Turlesky, a musician working in schools, Noëllie Poulain, a dancer, and myself. Ear and movement are very much linked in our workshops.
How do the children react?
When I intervene in classes of CM1, CM2, the children laugh when I produce strange sounds with my flute. It's funny: they are not very tall, but their ears are already formatted. The youngest have a new ear, without preconceptions, without codes. They welcome all sounds. This shows how important it is to make them aware at an early age of sound worlds that are off the beaten track, if only to pay attention to all the sounds that surround them.
How did you continue your work with children during the health crisis?
With all our activities stopped, we continued to offer sound hunts on Facebook and Youtube. In our videos, we invited families to create small musical awakening workshops at home. The idea is to awaken young children to the noises that punctuate their daily lives, the arrangement of which can easily be transformed into a little music. This exercise not only stimulates their creativity, but also introduces the idea of music being present everywhere, not just on a concert stage or in speakers. HANATSUmiroir's musical awakening work is to make the children understand that any noise, as soon as it is emitted with an intention and arranged with other noises, is transformed into a musical composition.
In addition to the HANATSUmini workshops, you are happy to organise guided concerts for families...
Yes, family sessions are organised alongside our concerts to welcome children and families, from nursery to primary school. We also created the Valley of Wonders at the Venice Biennale in 2018: a show for young audiences about the legends of the Roya Valley in the Alps, written by Maurilio Cacciatore. We are preparing, for the end of the season, Alicea tale by the German composer Ole Hübner. Thanks to our interventions in nurseries and schools, but also thanks to this formula of small participative performances, young ears quickly learn to open up: we can soon, naturally, offer them contemporary pieces.
Interview by Suzanne Gervais
The HANATSUmini playlist:
